The Electric State Is the Nightmare Haters Claimed Spielberg's Ready Player One to Be

It was hated at the time, but Steven Spielberg's Ready Player One looks so much better after watching The Electric State.

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Yet as hated as Ready Player One is among cineastes and those sick of 1980s Gen-X nostalgia, that definite overload of member berries still looks like a masterpiece next to The Electric State. And that’s not just because the Russo Brothers aren’t Spielberg (who is?). It’s because Ready Player One retains a genuine sense of loss as it rummages through the past, something that The Electric State can’t even fake. In the end, The Electric State is the movie all the detractors claimed Ready Player One to be: the bitter end point of cinema in the IP age.

Based on the novel by Ernest Cline, Ready Player One also takes place in a near-future where most people live in a virtual reality world called the OASIS after society’s rapid decline. Many of the OASIS’ inhabitants participate in a search for the Golden Easter Egg, a special treasure designed by the virtual reality’s creators James Halliday (Mark Rylance). It’s also a key to the late Halliday’s fortune and control over the OASIS. In other words, it’s a glistening promise of fulfillment and happiness in an empty world.

In one of the movie’s standout set-pieces, contestants have a race to find the next clue leading to the Egg’s location. The sequence is all Spielberg bravura filmmaking, an incredibly chase in which vehicles—including the DeLorean from Back to the Future, the motorbike from Akira, and monster truck Bigfoot—fly down a road filled with explosions, wrecking balls, the T-Rex from Jurassic Park, and of course King Kong. It’s thrilling stuff and never illegible thanks to Spielberg’s understanding of spacial dynamics and the audience’s relationship to the camera.

Delightful as the race is, it always ends in failure. No one can figure out how to get past Kong, who swipes away cars as they reach the finish line. That is until protagonist Parzival (Tye Sheridan) visits the archives of the now-deceased Halliday and watches a conversation between him and the OASIS’ co-founder Osgood Morrow (Simon Pegg). While Morrow insists that technology, culture, and our very lives must move forward, Halliday wistfully wonders why we can’t just “go backwards.”

Spielberg’s camera does one of his signature push ins as Parzival has a realization. That’s the answer. Go backwards. And in the next scene, we watch him go through the race again. But this time he doesn’t continue to barrel forward when he gets to the end. Instead he goes backwards, unlocking the secret to winning the race.

At first glance, the scene seems to be about Parzival being smarter than everyone else, and thus deserving of the status as champion. He has the pop culture knowledge to drive his DeLorean and the gaming smarts to approach the contest in a different way. Thus he is the hero. But as Ready Player One unfolds, it becomes clear that Halliday wasn’t just trying to give a hint about the game. He was trying to warn his players against playing the game altogether, or at least devoting so much of their lives to video games and pop culture ephemera.

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